A well-known problem in textile manufacture is the tendency of textiles to be distorted and stretched during manufacture and handling. If this distortion is not removed prior to manufacture of the finished garment, the garment will shrink when laundered as the tension in the fabric is relaxed. This is most apparent in garments manufactured from knit textiles, which are more prone to stretching and distortion than woven textiles.
When machine-knitted fabric comes off of the needle bed of the knitting machine, it is typically dyed in a dye kettle, wetted out on a pad for impregnating the fabric with desired additives (for example fabric softener), dried, and then fed into a processing machine such as a compacter or calender for surface finishing, and finally machine-rolled. The knitting, dyeing, wetting out, drying and rolling processes place the fabric under tension, resulting in a distortion of the fabric gauge from its relaxed state. The fabric remains distorted through subsequent cutting and making up stages, with the result that the finished garment retains this distortion. When the garment is washed and dried, the fabric relaxes and returns to its relaxed gauge, resulting in a garment that is smaller and more dense than when it was purchased. Thus, a garment manufacturer or distributor may estimate the amount of shrinkage that is likely to occur and specify an oversized garment to compensate for anticipated shrinkage.
It is therefore desirable to alleviate the effect of shrinkage during the textile manufacture or garment manufacture stages, before exposing the finished garment for sale. One method is to cut oversized garment pieces from the distorted fabric, with an excess length and width allowance so that when the garment is washed after processing, the garment will shrink down to its intended size. However, not all textiles stretch or shrink to the same degree, and even within the same roll of fabric the distortion and subsequent relaxation may not be consistent.
Shrinkage can be alleviated during the production stage by pre-shrinking the fabric. One method of accomplishing this is by wetting and tumble-drying the fabric. However, this process must be performed on the unrolled textile. Once the pre-shrinking process is completed, the fabric must be returned to roll form. Machine-rolling the pre-shrunk fabric again places it under tension, thus substantially eliminating any beneficial effect of pre-shrinking.
These difficulties are more pronounced when handling textiles manufactured in tubular form, which includes both textiles knitted in the round and textiles knitted flat and then joined along a selvedge to form a tube. In order to roll tubular textiles, the tube must be flattened. The fabric may then be belt-dried, however the fabric must be drawn into the belt dryer, which at best does not relax the fabric and may actually tension the fabric even more and exacerbate the extent of shrinkage. The alternative of tumble-drying the fabric does relax the fabric, however any relaxation of the fabric after tumble-drying is largely lost when the fabric is machine-rolled for further processing.
Another solution is to pre-wash the finished goods before sale to a distributor or retailer. This solution virtually eliminates shrinkage, however the pre-washed garments end up with a distressed look, which the distributor may not want, and it can nevertheless be difficult to provide a consistent degree of shrinkage in garments fabricated from different fabric batches or rolls.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,363,161 issued Dec. 14, 1982 to Catallo teaches a compacter for compressing a fabric, which reduces the amount of shrinkage in the textile roll and thus in the finished garments. However, this apparatus is fairly complex, and while it reduces shrinkage it cannot eliminate shrinkage, so the same problems are manifest, although to a lesser degree, in product manufactured from fabric treated through this compacter.
It would accordingly be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus for rolling a tubular textile without stretching the fabric, so that shrinkage removed prior to manufacture of the textile into finished garments is not reintroduced when the fabric is rolled into a form suitable for further processing.